November 18, 2010

The Product Design Research team met with Anab Jain yesterday. It was a good to get the opportunity to sit down with her individually and talk through our own research area and get her valued input.

Founder of Superflux and the instigator of The Power of 8 Anab has experience in interaction and service design, research, filmmaking and speculative design. Her experience in film making on various projects was particularly useful for me – thanks Anab!

November 14, 2010

Interactions | Transactions | Environment | Consumer

I have recently embarked on a new collaborative consumer focused study with Paul Gault (a fellow PhD student sponsored by NCR) called IxTEC. The project has several has several core aims: To develop methods for design research, to develop a richer understanding of consumers and their desired experience when interacting with self-service technology and for the research to ultimately feed into the Cx Design Strategy at NCR.

MSc Ethnography Post-it Session: Interactions

The first part of the ongoing study has involved engaging with the MSc Ethnography course at Dundee University. Through a series of activities from virtual postcard questionnaires, video probes, street work and several ethnographic post-it sessions a rich collection of information has been gathered. The process of this activity is as important to our research as the actual outcomes and it has been excellent having the ethnography course involved.

The next stages of this study will be to collate, understand and articulate all the information that has been collected. Once that stage is complete the information will generate content for a series of consumer focused workshops and further development of design research and consumer engagement methods.

November 14, 2010

Connection Boxes MkII

The connection boxes have had an upgrade! Now fitted with a super strong wireless chip which means they do not all need to be connected to each other. This is much more in line with the original concept and should make them much more reliable.

They have been installed in Dance Base as of last week. They are essentially a blank canvas for the Dance Base team. I will be interested to conduct further studies with them to understand what feedback they have uploaded onto them and how successful they have been in attracting customers to use them.

As part of the feedback I will be trying to understand what makes a consumer use a self-service device? What type or level of reward/feedback is appropriate? Also, what makes a consumer use the device again and again, how can you instil loyalty in a device?

The video includes sounds that were created by the Dance Base team. They were deliberately fun and even slightly cheeky to reflect the Dance Base ethos, environment and marketing strategy.

November 12, 2010

Last night I attended the 1st IxDA event. The event was about bringing together a bunch of like-minded individuals to chat about and drink over all things interaction…

The event was pulled together over a 2 week period by many individuals working together so all credit to them for getting it organised so quickly.

The Dundee chapter of IxDA is in its infancy but will hopefully be something that will build and grow as the word gets out there. It would be great to see more individuals from the design/interaction industry involved in future events.

Everyone who attended the event was invited to have a go on the Pencil DJ – it really was so cool! Using Arduino the “DJ” created a path of resistance in graphite that would control a series of sounds. It was really interesting how the different graphite shapes would create different sounds and when put together with the other “DJs” it sounded surprisingly good!